KRG is the official government of Northern Iraq, known as Kurdistan, with an 111-member parliament and a directly elected president. The president of Kurdistan is also the commander-in-chief of the Peshmerga Armed Forces.

“The Iraqi Kurds have been a steadfast and capable partner of the United States, and this bill will help ensure they have the support they need in the fight against ISIL,” Sen. Boxer said.

“ISIS is deadly and determined, and Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces – our critical partner in the fight against ISIS – need U.S. weapons as quickly as possible,” Sen. Ernst said in a statement.

This legislation, which, allows the president to give assistance to the Kurds in combating ISIS, was an opportunity for Sen. Paul to shed some of his Libertarian, isolationist image. Paul said on Tuesday:

“This Administration claims they need the legal authority to arm the Kurds. This bill removes any doubt that they have the authority and the renewed encouragement of Congress to provide our Kurdish allies the support they need to continue their fight against ISIS and radical Islam.”

The legislation would provide assistance for a three-year period, eliminating delays in bolstering the regional forces fighting against ISIS.

During the war in Iraq, when I was still living in London and coordinating news coverage of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein for various international media organizations, I was in regular contact with a brave Iraqi Kurdish journalist named Ayub Nuri. When Ayub and I finally met in person, several years later in New York, we spent a couple of hours talking about the region generally, and specifically about whether Israel had a natural ally in the Kurds.

So it was with some pleasure that I recently came across an interview with Ayub in which he said the following: “Kurds are deeply sympathetic to Israel and an independent Kurdistan will be beneficial to Israel. It will create a balance of power. Right now, Israel is one country against many. But with an independent Kurdish state, first of all Israel will have a genuine friend in the region for the first time, and second, Kurdistan will be like a buffer zone in the face of the Turkey, Iran and Iraq.”

Think about the meaning of those words, “a genuine friend.” In this context, it means a country in the region that not only respects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state but also actively seeks to strengthen mutual bonds. A country whose population is overwhelmingly Muslim but secular in political orientation, and one where the anti-Semitism that dominates elsewhere in the Islamic world is strikingly absent. Kurdistan actually is what many Jews mistakenly supposed Turkey to be: a Muslim-majority state with no ideological or theological objections to the idea of Jewish national self-determination.

Unlike the Palestinians, whose objections to Israel’s very existence have stymied repeated attempts to create a Palestinian state, the 30 million Kurds have never enjoyed similar international backing in their quest for independence. Instead, they have been repressed and even exterminated by the regimes in the countries in which they are concentrated: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. But thanks to the U.S.-led victory over Saddam, who launched a genocidal war against the Kurds in the mid-1980s – including the 1988 murder of around 5,000 mostly women and children during a chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja – the Kurds were able to consolidate a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the north of the country.

Over the past decade, talk of Kurdistan splitting from Iraq has continually surfaced. Many Jews, moved by the shared experience of our two peoples of genocide, and sympathetic to the fact that the Kurds have been the victims of Arab chauvinism in both its nationalist and Islamist forms, have supported such a move on moral grounds. Yet we shouldn’t forget that this is one situation in which, happily, moral considerations fit neatly with strategic ones.

As of this moment, the Kurds have little reason to hold back from declaring independence, as they have done in the recent past. For as long as the U.S. was seriously engaged in Iraq, and helping to guarantee de facto Kurdish control of the oil-rich north, the KRG was wise not to upset the delicate balance by making a move that would have caused a major headache for American relations with Turkey and other neighbors. Now, almost three years after President Obama withdrew American troops from Iraq, the Kurds are rightly skeptical that Washington will assist them in confronting the predators around their territories.

More and more the Middle East looks like a failed region rather than a collection of failed states. The obvious winners are jihadi groups like ISIS –the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, one of the most brutal Islamist terrorist organizations we have encountered to date – and the Iranian regime, which has exploited the general meltdown to boost the Assad regime in Damascus and the Hizbullah terrorists in Lebanon and Syria (and whose murky relations with the jihadis are closer than many people understand). Meanwhile, the Americans are stoking the sense that nothing short of a repeat of 9/11 will reverse their determination to wash their hands of this wretched region.

U.S. President Barack Obama has described Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the world leader in the Middle East with whom he has the closest relationship. But you wouldn’t know it, given the recent insults and reprimands various ministers in the Turkish government have hurled at the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, in addition to the very public backhanded attempt by Turkey to incite Syrian violence towards U.S. ally Israel.

Just a few days after a suicide attack on the U.S. Embassy in Turkey on February 1, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Francis J. Ricciardone, gave a lengthy press briefing which included a few mild rebukes. Ricciardone mentioned Turkey’s jailing of non-violent protesters and a lack of transparency regarding charges against a large number of imprisoned former military personnel and academics, as well as a limitation in Turkey’s international terrorism law.

The response to those remarks created a hailstorm of very public and very blunt attacks by many high level Turkish officials, all of which amounted to “get your nose out of our domestic business or get out.”

Ricciardone, a Fulbright Scholar who is fluent in Turkish, Arabic, French and Italian, was appointed to his current post by President Obama in 2011. The Ambassador has spent many years in various posts in the Middle East, and in 2001 was the Director of the State Department’s Coalition Against Terrorism.

In a reference to the dozens of Turkish nationals who were imprisoned after an alleged coup plot was uncovered, Ricciardone said, “You have your military leaders, who were entrusted with the protection of this country behind bars as if they were terrorists.”

He also said, “You have non-violent student protesters protesting tuition hikes behind bars. When a legal system produces such results and confuses people like that for terrorists, it makes it hard for American and European courts to match up.”

Ricciardone’s remarks ran more than a dozen pages long, most of which were complimentary about the host country. The points about which the Turks took greatest umbrage addressed the jailing of hundreds of members of the military in an alleged military coup.

That plot, known as “Sledgehammer,” was an alleged secularist military plan dating back to 2003. The suspects, all members of the Turkish military, allegedly planned to create havoc through coordinated acts of violence that included bombings throughout Turkey. The chaos would destabilize the government, thereby paving the way for a coup d’état. The Turkish military has successfully pulled out three coups since 1960.

In response to a journalist’s questions at the press event, Ricciardone said:

My point about the justice system though is that you are striving to improve it, your leaders, your ministers, have recognized the flaws in the justice system, among them being lengthy pre-trial detentions, lack of clarity in presenting charges, lack of transparency. Those are things your leaders – not your opposition, not foreign leaders – have spoken about.

But the response has been toxic.

AKP spokesman Huseyin Çelik vehemently censured the U.S. Ambassador for his remarks. Çelik was quoted in Turkish papers as saying on the private broadcasting channel Kanal A, “We are inviting Ricciardone to remain within his boundaries and limits. We are not pleased with [his remarks]; we condemn and denounce them. He should know his place.”

Çelik said of Ricciardone, “You are a diplomat; how can you make a judgment on those issues when you don’t even know the whole nature of the events and how the system works? Who gives you the right to question [the political and legal system]?”

Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ also said Ricciardone should avoid making statements which could be considered an intervention into Turkey’s domestic laws. In what sounds very much like a warning, the Deputy Prime Minister said it will be better for both Turkey and the U.S. if the ambassador minds his own business.

“It would be better if Ricciardone minded his own business,” Bozdağ said. “Those are statements that do not bode well for his assignment in Turkey.”

Another Deputy Prime Minister, Bülent Arınç, said it was “inappropriate” for Ricciardone to have made his comments, explaining on a private broadcasting network SKY Turk, “there is a problem arising from the personality of the esteemed ambassador,” but, Arınç claimed, the ambassador has issued an apology letter which means “he is conscious that what he has done is not correct.”